Geddy Lee has spent 18 months working with a vocal coach to restore his upper range for Rush‘s “Fifty Something” tour.
Geddy Lee began formal vocal training around 18 months ago, after more than five decades of professional singing, in order to perform Rush‘s catalogue at its written pitch on the band’s current tour.
Speaking to Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone, Lee said he approached the coach Mitch Seekins, who works remotely from the town of Ilderton, Ontario, on a friend’s recommendation and has been taking sessions with him over video calls.
“It was important to me to do as many original versions for our audience as we could, and I didn’t want to have to start changing keys to every song and go into that whole bulls**t. So how do I do that? Well, a friend of ours recommended this vocal coach for me. His name is Mitch Seekins, and he’s a terrific guy. He’s a great singer, lives in the country now, and that’s his job. He coaches all kinds of people. It’s really interesting. He coaches opera people. He coaches a lot of rock bands. He coaches one guy who does the play-by-play announcement at a horse racetrack. So, all kinds of people need vocal training, for various [reasons]… He coaches people that, for one reason or another, have started to lose their voice. And so he’s very well-versed in analyzing what you got. So I started with him — what? — about a year and a half ago now. And the first few sessions, he was listening to what I had, and he said, ‘Okay. Well, you’ve got a voice that the muscles are out of shape. So you haven’t sung in 11 years. That’s normal.’ So after the first number of sessions, he said, ‘Well, the good news is you still have that range in there, but we’ve gotta strengthen your voice so you can access it.’ So that became the beginning of this whole exercise regime. It’s no different than going to the gym and getting strong. I go to the gym four days a week, get my body strong. Well, you have to get this muscle [that controls your vocal cords] strong, and that’s what I’ve worked on. And as we went along, he’s very good at getting me to stretch my range and also give me confidence in my range. Part of it is learning new techniques to access your range so that you’re not working so hard to do it. He would look at videos. Sometimes he’d come to rehearsal, and he would video me. I’d go, ‘Well, that’s embarrassing.’ And he would show me the video and say, ‘Look how hard you’re working to hit that note.’ But yet when we’re warming up, you hit that note, and you’re not working hard at all. So you have to learn, while you’re standing there, to breathe at the right time — that’s more than half of it — and to position your vocals and to take a more forensic look at how a voice makes a sound and apply it.’ So it’s been a year and a half, but it’s paying off, and I’m pretty pleased at my progress. I think if I keep working at it, it’ll keep getting better, I think. I hope. And I have to stay healthy,” Geddy explained (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
After the interviewer noted he is now probably reaching notes he had assumed were beyond him, Geddy described being talked into attempting songs he had written off.
“I thought, ‘There’s no way I can do that song,” he continued. “There’s no way I can do that song. I can’t hit those notes.’ And he would listen to them and he’d go, ‘Well, that’s an E. That’s high, but you can hit it. You’re doing E in warm-ups.’ And this is not E. This is an octave above everyone’s normal E. ‘And I’ve stretched you out to F sharp. I’ve stretched you out to G.’ … So I was nervous to try some of those songs, and then he would encourage me, and I would do them. And I would struggle at first, and then I’d listen to them with him, and he’d go, ‘No, you can do this. Try this. Breathe here. Remember when you’re singing the choruses of A Farewell To Kings, make it bounce.’ And that helps. All those little tricks — they’re not tricks; they’re exercises — help you realize, ‘Look, I got this.'”
He said the technique had come naturally in the band’s early years and had gone unmaintained since.
“[Mitch] said, ‘When I listen to your early records, I can’t believe the way you’re hitting those notes without even thinking about it.’ Because it’s a combination — it’s what they call blending, where you’re blending chest voice and head voice, and I did that instinctively my whole life,” Geddy added. “And at a certain point, I didn’t really work on the techniques to keep those high songs, so we just started dropping some of those super-high songs. And so that was a challenge for me to bring them back.”
Two songs in the current set have been transposed. Geddy set out which, and why.
He said: “‘Anthem”s down a step, and ‘2112‘ is down a step. Everything else is in the original key. Well, frankly, ‘Anthem‘ sounds much heavier down a step. Sometimes you drop a step to make the song feel more powerful. And although I could do ‘2112‘ in its original key, I think it just sounds heavier like this now. Now that’s partly an excuse and partly the truth. So, yeah, both of those songs I don’t think have suffered. We were gonna drop ‘Kings‘ originally. And then we went, ‘Nah, it just sounds better in its original key, so we have to keep it in the original key.’ So, we went through the whole catalog like that, judging if the keys were fine and especially with ‘Freewill‘. There was no way I would do that song unless I could hit that third verse, which is really the highest verse that I sing all night.”
The “Fifty Something” tour opened on June 7 at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, the venue where Rush finished the “R40” tour on August 1, 2015. It is the band’s first road work in eleven years and the first without Neil Peart, whose place has been taken by German drummer Anika Nilles, previously a member of Jeff Beck‘s touring band. Keyboardist Loren Gold, who has worked with The Who and Chicago, was announced in February, making this the first Rush tour with more than three principal musicians. Each night runs to two sets drawn from a pool of over 40 songs.
Geddy‘s voice has already forced a change of plan once this year. Two shows were postponed on July 1 after he was diagnosed with laryngitis and bronchitis.
The 2026 leg through Canada, the United States and Mexico began as 22 dates and sold out on announcement. It now stands at 58 shows across 24 cities, with more than half a million tickets sold. In February the band added South American and European dates for early 2027, their first European shows since 2013 and their first in South America in 17 years, with the run scheduled to close in Helsinki on April 10, 2027.
Geddy has been clear that the road has a limit. He said earlier this month that “there are only so many gigs left” in his body and ruled out recording new Rush material.
Geddy and Alex Lifeson first played publicly with Nilles at the Juno Awards in Hamilton, Ontario in late March, performing “Finding My Way” from the 1974 debut, the only Rush album Peart does not appear on. It was their first performance billed as Rush since 2015, though the pair had appeared under their own names at tributes to Gordon Lightfoot and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.
Peart died on January 7, 2020 at 67, after a three-and-a-half-year illness with glioblastoma. His death was announced three days later. His widow Carrie Nuttall-Peart and daughter Olivia publicly backed the tour when it was announced.
